Movie review: Documentary explores photography of Garry Winogrand

By Al Alexander/For the Patriot Ledger

Friday

Oct 12, 2018 at 3:37 AM

Full disclosure: I’d previously never heard of photographer Garry Winogrand. And I know, it’s a lot like a film critic admitting he’d never heard of Frank Capra. But my ignorance proves bliss in discovering such a talented artist in Sasha Waters Freyer’s absorbing documentary, “Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographical.”

Winogrand’s eye, his use of light and his vérité style are all jaw-dropping. So is his perceptiveness in chronicling an America undergoing a social metamorphosis in the 1960s. His mixture of blacks and whites in black and white are stark, haunting and revealing, particularly his most controversial photo of a very handsome interracial couple holding a pair of chimpanzees as if they were carrying young children snuggled to their breasts. Is it racist? Or, is it liberating? I’m still not sure, but I know the photo blew me away. And it isn’t the only one.

There’s also a terrific shot of three, proud, beautiful young women strolling down an L.A. sidewalk cast in an almost heaven-sent beam of sunshine, while off to their immediate right sits, in the shadows, a seriously disabled man – head down – in a wheelchair begging for money.

The contrast in fortunes is both profound and moving. Then there’s the shot of nubile Ali MacGraw dropping cash into a blind man’s pencil cup in Winogrand’s native New York City, where there’s long lived a huge disparity in wealth and worth.

How is it that a man and his camera are so blessed with the sense of timing and composition to memorialize such a poignant moment in a second’s time?

The film chalks it up to Winogrand’s skill of possessing the grace and moves of a dexterous basketball player combined with a trigger finger always resting on the shutter. As one of the many talking heads, including “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner, enthuses, Winogrand was “the first digital photographer” because he shot photos with the idea he was working with an endless roll of film. And if we needed proof of that, one only look at the dozens of Hefty bags filled with roughly 300,000 shots he never bothered to develop before his untimely death at age 56 in 1984.

Of the roughly one million pictures he did process, by far the most famous is his iconic shot of Marilyn Monroe standing over the New York subway grate with her sleek, white halter dress billowing up so high it nearly gave censors heart attacks. That photo, taken in 1954 as a stunt to promote her new film, “The Seven-Year Itch,” was so crude, yet beautiful, it reportedly drove her then husband, Joe DiMaggio, to ask for a divorce.

Funny I should mention that, because Winogrand went through a wife or two or three, too, each of them discovering they could not possibly compete with his first love: a camera. But no one doubted he loved women. He loved to photograph them even more. He even compiled a book in 1975 titled “Women Are Beautiful,” which immediately got him labeled “sexist” by the bra-burning crowd. And it was because they dispensed with their harnesses, NYU professor Shelley Rice says Winogrand became obsessed with shooting “nipples” poking out from behind clingy dresses and T-shirts.

Winogrand, not surprisingly, was unfazed by the uproar. And that’s because taking pictures was like a therapy for him. The only person he was trying to impress was himself in his infinite search for identity and worth. Clearly, he was a very complicated man with many underlying neuroses, but Freyer doesn’t seem intent on digging deeper into his peccadillos. What we see of him is what we see in the photos he takes. One also craves to know more about his Jewish upbringing in the Bronx and how his love of photography developed. In that respect, her insights are mostly cursory.

What’s clear is that Winogrand was every bit as influential as contemporaries and pals Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, all three lumped into a genre called “street,” which they detested. They were simply photographers, all fascinated by people and faces when put together to create a portrait of America at a certain time and place. And it’s a testament that those pictures all live on, just as vital and current as the day they were shot, whether that was yesterday or 50 years ago. In a word, they are timeless.